As the semiconductor manufacturing processes grow in complexity, it becomes increasingly necessary to transfer wafers among a number of different process modules or tools, and those tools are usually separated by significant distances, which may result in increased risk of particle contamination of wafers, when wafers are transferred between separate vacuum tools. Therefore, it usually depends on the vendors to develop or integrate in-situ tool to fulfill the semiconductor manufacturing process requirement, but in this way, it induces the IP leakage and poor flexibility on vendor selection. On the other hand, because the wafer per hour (WPH) of the processing chambers of the platform is unbalanced, the productivity of the platform is very low. Some processing chambers with high WPH need to wait for those with low WPH, which lowers the utilization of the processing chambers. For solving this problem, some traditional methods, such as the linear platform connects extra processing chambers to the platform to increase the chamber quantity of the platform. However, the business model of the chambers' procurement and operations is complicated, and the integration and software development for multi-chamber combination is complicated, either.
Hence, because of the defects in the prior arts, there is a need to solve the above problems.